“Joyeuses fêtes” as the French say at this time of year – happy parties. It’s one of those usefully vague French expressions, like “bonne continuation”, which means “enjoy whatever you’re going to do after we’ve said goodbye, not that I really care what it is” – a lot like the English “have a good one”, I suppose, but without the potentially vulgar overtones.

The question is: have the fêtes actually been joyeuses in France? From my own strictly non-scientific observations here in Paris, amongst the people who either haven’t got a country house, don’t want to go to their country house, haven’t got enough money or conveniently situated relatives to go to the sun, don’t like ski-ing, or have found out there’s no snow where they were intending to go, I’d say it was a bit like an old-fashioned English football match – a good effort but not much excitement.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, a time when it is usually as easy to do last-minute Christmas shopping… Read more

It’s no coincidence that actor Gérard Depardieu has recently ballooned to resemble a fattened turkey. By leaving France for tax reasons, he has offered himself up as a Christmas sacrifice. He has given the government the chance to blame all the country’s economic woes on people like him, and become an easy target for the notoriously anti-rich French public opinion.

By simultaneously putting his palatial Parisian house on the market, he has also invited in the intruders. You can see the photos of the house on the internet, though personally I would advise against perusing them because it is like seeing a picture of bad cosmetic surgery. The place looks as though it has been re-decorated as a set for a film about a 1990s interior designer whose mission in life is to prove that you can never be too nouveau riche. The dining room is a cross between an ice rink and a car showroom, and the bedroom on show (one of… Read more

I was recently invited to be a judge at a debate on whether beer is the new wine. Impossible subject, a bit like saying football is the new music, but fun nonetheless. The teams of speakers were international students, and impressive ones, too – the French students’ English was so fluent that at times I couldn’t tell whose language was whose.

They wandered off the argument a little, praising each drink’s powers to inspire creativity. Hemingway, Van Gogh, Baudelaire and I can’t remember who else were all meant to have written while knocking back the rouge, while the Rolling Stones and Radiohead penned their best tunes over a good pint. I argued that literary critics have definitely overlooked the influence of mojitos on Hemingway’s work (there can’t have been much Bordeaux available in Cuba or Key West), and that bands like Radiohead probably drink nothing but wheatgrass smoothies. A,nd… Read more

Like anyone who commits words to paper or screen, I am a lexicophile. That is a lover of words. At least, I think that’s the right word. Anyway, I love them, not from a distance, but more in a hands-on way which I hope is consensual. All of which explains why my brain constantly searches out puns or words that mean different things in different languages. I remember when the leaders of France and Germany were Edith Cresson and Helmut Kohl, or, if you translate them into English, Edith Watercress and Helmut Cabbage. Shame, I used to think, they weren’t Greens. (Warning: that is only the first time that a rimshot will be necessary during this blog, though almost none of the following word gags will be my fault.)

Similarly, it has always amused me that one of the départments in the north of France, Aisne, sounds exactly like the noun aine, meaning groin. A very unglamorous-sounding name for a place that is home to France’s Champagne-producing vineyards. Less the groin of France… Read more

The Ritz is, famously, the hotel where Princess Diana spent the last hours before her car accident, and where Ernest Hemingway had his first drink on returning to Paris in 1944 (he “liberated” the bar and raided the Champagne).

It is also, much less famously these days, the hotel that was used as a wartime residence by the Nazi top brass, and where Coco Chanel shacked up with her lover, a delightful-sounding SS man called Hans Günther von Dincklage.

Coco and Hans weren’t there when Hemingway and his GI friends turned up for their post-Occupation drink, of course. Madame Chanel’s influence was such that she was allowed to slink away to Switzerland and join Hans for a peaceful retirement.

History is ever-present in the hotel. Its imperial suite, for example, is an exact replica of Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom (the one as the Palace of Versailles, of course, not the… Read more